28. September 2008 by Joe Gergen.

Not sure even how to describe the band I saw at the Cedar Cultural Center on Saturday. The Nordic Roots Festival brought over a Swedish group called “Detektivbyrån”, I believe Detective Bureau in English.

The easy part to describe would be how they looked. Imagine if the Ramones’ parents had given them a glockenspiel, an accordion and sampling keyboard instead of guitars and drums. Exactly. Just imagine Joey Ramone rocking the accordian with one hand and playing the keyboard with the other and throw in some head thrashing and you got it.

How do they sound? Infectious, energetic, and great deal a lot like you would expect a glockenspiel, an accordion put through an effects board, some sampling and a drum kit would sound. I know that watching and listening to them made me smile. I noticed it made many people around me smile too.  Except for the guy down the row who plugged his ears on one song, though that may be was because of the piercing loudness of some of the higher pitcthed glockenspiel notes.

Anyway, you can listen here  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLTS0tcqgZE to one example.

I think the thing that sealed the deal on the concert was when the drummer played a scissors as the percussion instrument through an entire song. And it did actually sound like a scissors snapping shut. Snip snipsnip, snip snipsnip, snip snipsnip. Ya, baby.

The wonderful creative minds out there. Which reminds me the other day I saw an ad for “Dancing with the Stars,” which I have never seen, but I thought it said “Dancing with the Bears.” Now that would be cool. Just try to look sexy doing the tango with a bear, assuming it will dance a tango. I can just see this giant Russian Bear standing there with his arms crossed saying “I only dance Mazurka.” Contestants would be more worried about being thrown off the stage than thrown off the show.

I’ll have to name my first recording, “If You can get a Bear to Tango” or maybe “Songs to get Tossed By.”

But back to the Detektivbyrån. Oh, just go listen to them. You’ll get the idea.

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18. August 2008 by Joe Gergen.

Packing peanuts, that is.  If you ever order anything online, you know that everything is sent to you with packing peanuts. I ordered a book. It came protected by packing peanuts.  I appreciate the effort to ensure the safety of my book, but really. I ordered some supplements online.  Two little bottles came in a 10×10 box filled with peanuts.  Would you like some product with those peanuts or are the peanuts just fine? I was tempted to order some circus peanuts online but was afraid I might eat the wrong ones.

It’s an inundation of peanuts. Soon they’ll take up more room in landfills than disposable diapers, which may or may not be worse than incinerating them.

But unbeknownst to me there is an underworld of Styrofoam scrappers (metal scrappers are a whole other story) out there who want your peanuts. My friend Linda gets kudos for pointing this one out to me.  She was cleaning out some old boxes and packages and had all these packing peanuts. So she went out to Craigslist and informed people that she had several bags of packing peanuts for free. Apparently she got all kinds of responses and someone who sells stuff on ebay came and picked them up.  What other subcultures are out there on Craigslist? Hmmm.

So all you people ordering things online and especially you ebay addicts (you know who you are), save those peanuts.  And when you have a couple bags full, let Craigslist know and we’ll save the planet one peanut at a time. 

Too bad there’s nothing to be done with those disposable diapers. Unless there’s some strange world of diaper scrappers out there that I don’t know about yet…or maybe I don’t want to know.

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23. June 2008 by Joe Gergen.

I hope not because I am kind of OK giving out a recommendation once in a  while but not unsolicited advice. I think a recommendation goes  “If you like sushi you should try this new place,” while advice goes “You should eat less salt because you are look like you are retaining water.” Read the rest of this entry »

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